QR Codes & Research

It's been a while, but I am really excited about a research paper my enrichment class worked on this past 6 weeks.  It was an interesting process, I normally work with the struggling students, which I love to work with, so this semester when I was given the higher level enrichment group, I was really excited to try a research paper with my firsties.  Oh man was this interesting!!  We recently took a fieldtrip to the aquarium so I thought what  great way to bring in the fieldtrip, some research and writing into the class. 

So this is how it went.  I had 4 groups.  In each group I had 3-4 kids, 2 iPads, and 1 research packet.  For my research packet, I did a little research myself.  I looked through the web and found some other research papers and read through the questions and picked and modified some questions that I thought would work for this project.  Next, I looked for websites that I wanted the kids to use during their research.  I read through each website and made sure that 1. It had language that they understood.  2. It did not have material I did not want them to use.  3. It contained answers to one or more of the questions on the research paper.  If they followed all of the above, I then added the websites to the home screen and the docked them.  Students were only allowed to use the pages and apps that were on the iPad dock; however, I still had problems, students were finding this too overwhelming.  They were not sure which website answered which questions, etc.  I normally sat down with one group per day, but found the other groups getting very little done when I did not sit down with them.  I decided to change it up a bit, but still did not have any success, so I began to think how can I help my firsties and make it to where I was available to all the groups at once? Then it came to me, QR codes.  I love them and I have been wanting to use them more in the classroom.  So I went in did a little more research and found the answers to the questions and then created a QR code for each question(s) that had the answer in that website.  Students then scanned the QR code, found their answer and then wrote them down.

This worked and the students were so excited in scanning the QR codes to find the answers.  You can see samples of two of the sheets in the photos above.  This was so much more efficient for my firsties.  They really enjoyed using the QR code scanners and it did not take very long to train them on how to use the QR codes and the scanners. 

I used QR Stuff (www.qrstuff.com) to create the codes.  I love this website, it is very easy to use and you can create different color QR codes, which made it easy for me when I saved the QR codes after creating them.  I color coded the QR codes so I knew which ones belonged to which topic.  I saved the QR code pictures using the topic of the question that could be answered using that code.  On our iPads, I use the QR Reader for iPad.  I love this one, it is VERY easy to use. 

Like I mentioned before I LOVE QR codes.  I am trying to use them on my books on CD (a Pinterest find).  I want to upload the CDs to my iTunes accounts and create a QR code to place on the book and then scan it to get to the audio portion of the book.  I love this idea for my struggling readers.  This is for sure a summer project.  Leave me a comment on how you use QR codes in your classroom.